Pros

Cons

Reporting tools fairly light.
No included billing features.
Very few integrations with other services.
No mobile apps.

Bottom Line

Volerro enables kanban-style project management.
It also provides superb tools for communicating, from an in-app chat box to browser-based PDF- and image-markup tools.
This otherwise excellent service comes up short on mobile apps and integration with other services, however.

29 May 2019

The best collaboration apps help teams get work done efficiently. They provide a central online place where a group of people can log in to get information about who's doing what and the state of the work. Volerro is a work-management app that uses the kanban methodology (more on kanban in a moment) to help teams plan, organize, and track their work. To give a frame of reference, Trello is probably the most well-known kanban board app. What makes Volerro different from other collaboration tools is that its free account gives you all the same features that come with a paid account, and it has tools that help teams discuss image files and PDFs.

Apps that use kanban sometimes get mistaken for project management apps, but they're not quite the same thing. Kanban board apps are better suited for handling ongoing work than projects, which by definition have a firm start date, end date, and deliverable. True project management software is something else entirely. If that's what you need, the Editors' Choices for small businesses are Teamwork Projects and Zoho Projects. LiquidPlanner is the Editors' Choice for large organizations.

What Is Kanban?

Kanban is a method for organizing work that originated in Japan. It's easiest to explain using an example. Imagine a board with columns labeled To Do, Doing, and Done, and a pile of sticky notes next to it. On each sticky note, we write a task that must be done, such as "take out the trash" or "install windshield on vehicle, serial number 654321." We might add more detail to these task cards, such as the due date or the person we'd like to do the job.

Once a sticky note has a task on it, we stick it in the To Do column. Some cards may already have people assigned to their tasks and some may not. Or, we can tell our team mates to claim new assignments from the To Do pile by writing their names on the task cards. In any event, as people start to work on the tasks, they move the affiliated sticky note into the Doing column. When they finish, they put it in the Done column. That's the gist of it.

Your columns don't have to be called To Do, Doing, Done, although kanban is uniquely suited to managing tasks as they flow through a process, i.e., move through a workflow.

With kanban, you can organize nearly anything, from vacations you want to plan to applicants you're reviewing for a job. That said, one of the reasons kanban was created is because it's good at tracking work through a workflow and limiting the amount of work assigned to any one person at a time. If you have a rule that no one can have more than X tasks assigned to them at once, you prevent bottlenecks because no one will ever have too many tasks assigned to them. That's called a work-in-progress (WIP) limit.

Hopefully, you now see understand a little bit about why kanban board apps are unique among work-management apps.

Volerro Pricing and Plans

If you want to start using Volerro, you can do so for free and get access to all the features the app has to offer. The free plan only lets you manage three projects, however, and there's a 100MB cap on storage.

Paid plans, called Business Teams, start at $7.99 per person per month. You can get a slight discount for paying annually. The Business Teams plan is the same as the free plan except that you can manage as many projects as you wish, and you get unlimited storage. The Business Teams plan is suitable for, but not strictly limited to, organizations of up to 50 people.

For organizations with 50 or more people, Volerro suggests its Enterprise Teams plan. Contact the company for a price estimate. All plans come with SSL encryption and daily data backups.

Compared with similar apps, Volerro's starting price is low. Trello charges $12.50 per person per month. LeanKit, which is perhaps the most full featured kanban app I've tested, charges anywhere from $19 to $29 per person per month, billed annually.

Volerro Setup and Interface

Anyone with an email address can sign up for a Volerro account. Upon creating an account, you get a workspace from which you can manage a variety of "projects." I use quotes there because, after my whole song and dance about how kanban is different from project management, we're still stuck with this word "project" to mean a set of related tasks. My apologies for any confusion.

From the main dashboard, each project appears as a card with a title, a background image or color, and a few quick facts, such as the project's completion date and the when it was most recently updated.

Within the project, you create your kanban boards. The card view, which is the same thing as the kanban board view, is optional. You can change your tasks to appear in a list, in content view (where you see any uploaded assets at the fore), or as a calendar.

I find Volerro fairly simple to use and understand. The app has tutorial videos, but I didn't need them. The interface is self-explanatory, which is exactly what you want in a productivity app so that you can focus on your work.

Volerro Experience and Features

I quickly set up a project, invited collaborators to join, created a few tasks and subtasks, and added more details. You can also create and save templates within Volerro, which takes a lot of the work out of setting up future projects.

The tools for assigning a task, setting deadlines, adding tags, and so forth appear when you open the task. You can filter your list of tasks to see only the information you want to see, such as tasks due today, or all tasks assigned to me.

Tasks in Volerro come with a time estimate field, as well as a progress bar at the top showing how close to complete the task is. You add time worked in one of three ways: 1) by sliding the progress bar, 2) by typing a number into a field, or 3) by launching a timer when you start a task and having the minutes and seconds worked automatically tally up.

Tags are color-coded and remind me a lot of how Trello handles them. You can upload custom colors to make your own tags. Kanban uses a lot of visuals, so when you add a tag, a corresponded colored bar appears on the card in the board view. That's the purpose of it. For the purpose of organizing information, however, text tags or hashtags that aren't necessarily tied to a color would be more beneficial. Volerro doesn't have them. Neither does Trello for that matter.

Missing from Volerro are WIP limits, custom fields, and swim lanes. Custom fields allow teams to add something to cards that's unique to the project or the team. For example, if you were to use a kanban board to track applicants, you might add a custom field called Transcripts Received with a yes/no option, if that's something you want to track. Swim lanes are a view sometimes used in kanban that add horizontal sorting in addition to the vertical sorting that comes from having columns. LeanKit has all those features, as does KanbanFlow.

Volerro has reports and analytics, such as a content report, which I found pretty neat. You can generate a table that shows how many times people opened and viewed the files that were uploaded to a project. You can also see if they were downloaded and how many times.

The reports and analytics are useful, but aren't nearly as comprehensive as those offered by the most advanced project management systems, such as LiquidPlanner. LiquidPlanner is probably the creme de la creme for reports. It's both a project management app and time management platform, with extensive tools for keeping track of billable versus non-billable hours, working around employee time off, and more. If you're really into reports and are juggling a lot of resources, LiquidPlanner is certainly worth investigating further.

While testing Volerro, I ran into a temporary hiccup where the app wouldn't show new changes in real time. I had to refresh the page to see changes I had made, as well as changes my teammates entered. I reached out to the company, and a representative assured me that the problems were a result of a bug and that it would be fixed within two days. I was glad to hear it, but at the same time, I did experience a few days when the app didn't work as expected.

Volerro Communication

You and your collaborators can comment on tasks and upload files to them, as well. Volerro throws in some tools for commenting on image files and PDFs, and they're within the web browser so you don't have to download the file and open it elsewhere.

The tool lets you place a marker on the image and type a comment in a comments field off to the side. For office documents, such as Word docs, Volerro lets you open them right in the web browser and then add tools for commenting and annotating. It's simple and straightforward, though a bit light on options. You won't find arrows, stickers, or other markup tools. Regardless, Volerro's tools are sufficient, and it's better than not having them at all.

I was impressed to find an included conference bridge tool in Volerro that, with one click of a mouse, shows you a dial-in number to host a phone meeting. That's pretty convenient for teams who work remotely, although with many organizations adopting team chat apps, such as Slack, that often include calling and video conferencing features, it's hard to say whether anyone shopping for work-management software cares if it's included. Volerro has an in-app chat box, too. You can message with colleagues in real time or asynchronously. When it's in real time, you see a chat box in the lower right corner of your screen. When done asynchronously, you end up on a page with your message history.

Apps and Integrations

Volerro doesn't have any dedicated mobile apps, but it does have a mobile website. In testing it on an iPhone, Vollero didn't render perfectly, with text at the top of the screen crashing.

While many kanban board apps and other work-management apps let you integrate with a wide variety of online business tools that you already use, Volerro doesn't at all. Trello and LeanKit are a much better apps when it comes to integrations, letting you connect to JIRA, Zendesk, GitHub, and many others.

Excellent for Collaboration

Volerro is an inexpensive kanban app that has helpful tools for commenting on and discussing visual assets. It has an adequate feature set, although no WIP limits, custom fields, or swimlanes. The lack of integrations with other services may be an additional drawback, depending on your needs.

Among kanban apps, LeanKit is the most feature-rich, making it an Editors' Choice. Asana is another Editors' Choice in the area, although kanban board views are merely a feature within the app and not really the star of the show. Still, both are worth exploring if you're in the market for an excellent work-management app, though both cost more than Volerro.

Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, ... See Full Bio